SAGE Project

Highlights

Founded in 1981 as a local business in Newcastle, Sage Group Plc, commonly known as Sage, provides software to small and medium-sized businesses, from 0 employees on up. Sage’s software manages accounting, ERP, HR, payroll, payments, assets, construction, and real estate.

Sage helps millions of small and medium-sized business customers succeed and operate in 23 countries, including Spain. The rapid evolution of technology within all size companies has made it necessary to update business applications to new platforms and devices.

This is the reason why Sage Spain decided to adapt three of its current solutions, Sage Murano, Sage Despachos and Sage Contaplus Flex and offer it’s clients more interactive products.

Xamarin was selected because of the ability to share complex business logic while providing a native UI

75% of the source code is shared between iOS and Android.

All platforms serviced at the same time.

Sage Spain enterprise applications manage success thanks to Xamarin and Plain Concepts

Small and medium companies used to have a limited and rigid technological infrastructure, usually desktop machines paired with small corporative networks. But nowadays smartphones and tablets are ubiquitous, and customers need to be able to perform business operations easily from these devices.

Sage Spain decided to partner with Plain Concepts to help them adapt to this new mobile world of always connected devices. Plain Concepts was chosen for the excellent quality of their staff, their broad experience, and their knowledge of Sage Spain key scenarios.

Plain Concepts, a Xamarin Premier Consulting Partner and world leader on application development with presence in the US, EU and UAE, was selected to bring Sage Spain solutions to iOS and Android devices.

Plain Concepts used its experience in developing innovative ad-hoc technological solutions to create three high quality apps and customize their UI to provide the best experience in each mobile platform.

Transitioning to a new world

“Plain Concepts/Xamarin helped us accelerating development and improving maintainability of

our multi-device mobile solutions!” Mr. Santiago Ortega, Principal Software Architect, Sage Spain

When building an application, Sage Spain did not only want the best team, but also to use the best technologies available. That is why Xamarin, an incredibly well design framework, C#, a powerful language, and Visual Studio, a productive development environment were the best combination.

Xamarin gives access to native features with easy to consume APIs, clear documentation, and quick updates to new iOS and Android features. At the same time, when combined with Visual Studio, the different visual editors allowed us to craft really immersive UIs and experience, and the debugger and profiling tools allowed us to detect bugs and performance efficiently

Best technologies to offer the best solutions

Plain Concepts has a very deep knowledge of Microsoft technologies like C# and .NET, and platforms like Windows 8.1, Windows Phone and Xbox One. Thanks to this expertise, Plain Concepts has been awarded Microsoft Gold Partner for the past five years.

Using Xamarin for multiplatform mobile development is a natural fit, as Plain Concepts can leverage their C# technical expertise and at the same time apply proven design patterns and practices for Windows Phone to iOS and Android.

This has allowed Plain Concepts and Sage Spain to reduce development time and cost compared to a set of applications developed in Java and Objective-C.

Leveraging existing expertise

When an application is critical to the management of a company, one of the main concerns is how updates are rolled out. Client environments include a variety of device types and operating systems, and often, some platforms are improved and updated ahead of others.

Code sharing through a common business logic library enables Plain Concepts to maintain feature parity in all platforms, making sure all Sage Spain customers always experience the same unified experience.

No platform left behind

“It was a challenging project but nothing we couldn’t overcome and thanks to Xamarin, we were

able to tackle all these platforms at once!”” Javier Cantón, Multiplatform Development Team Lead